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Immigration, the latest legislative farce

**Posted by Phineas

I’ve been taking a break, catching up on my reading, and a recent column by Andrew McCarthy reminded me of the disgust I felt at the shameful process by which Obamacare was passed, a feeling I’m experiencing again as the Senate moves closer to the passage of the 1,000+ pages-long immigration bill. So, I thought I’d share an excerpt from it that sums up my feelings quite nicely:

But there is a larger point: no “important legislation” should be 100 pages long, much less 1,200 (or the even more mind-boggling girth of monstrosities like Obamacare). The United States Constitution is about 4,500 words long — outfits like Cato and Heritage publish it in small pamphlets that can be read in a few minutes. Nowadays, not only are the bills so gargantuan that no one could conceivably master them and predict their consequences; each page produces even more pages of regulations. They can’t even be lifted, much less digested.

You cannot have a functioning democratic republic when the laws are so voluminous no one can know what the law is. And that is especially the case when (a) the rationale for passing new laws — according to “reform” proponents like Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan — is that we don’t enforce the laws currently on the books; (b) key parts of legislation consist of commitments to do what previously enacted law already commands; and (c) the president, notwithstanding his oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, claims the power to refrain from enforcing whatever laws he disapproves of. Washington has made a farce of the legislative process and of the once proud boast that we are ”a nation of laws not men.”

Yep. My only quibble would be to add “Once again,…” to the start of the last sentence.

Then again, what’s the point of making it even just one page, when many don’t feel a need to even read the bills they’re voting on?

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3 thoughts on “Immigration, the latest legislative farce”

First, it should be a felony to vote on any bill without reading it.
Second, the “Declaration”, “Constitution” and “Bill of Rights (which gave us all our freedoms) can be printed on about 20 pages in todays pdf format. Obama(doesn’t)care (which took many of our freedoms away) was nearly 2,500 pages. The tax code is over 70,000 pages long. This is a government run-amuck.

To the point that bills nowadays are so voluminous they cannot be lifted, if the Obhammudcare bill were stacked on an office floor, it would be 7 feet tall constituting an unsafe work environment. Passing bills of such a gargantuan nature insures the laws making it onto the books will never be enforced, let alone lifted. No one has a clue what is in them.

The reason so little is known about Obhammudcare in the first place is that the corrupt media people normally used to rely on to stay informed was too busy during its passage taking a wild goose chase to AK to paw through Sarah Palin’s official emails, which they in turn had to farm out to hirelings to be read.

Remember when the watchword used to be, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”?

1) Remember, ObhammedCare is just the beginning of the paperwork. There are already volumes of regulations created by non-elected bureaucratic welfarers because Congress has given its right to create laws to those unelected bureaucratic welfarers.

2) It should be a law that no more laws, except those that repeal existing laws, can be made (including regulations created by bureaucratic welfarers) until the existing laws are enforced. This would include immigration laws and laws fining and jailing employers who hire criminal aliens.